An old chewing gum commercial says "Double your pleasure, double your fun," but I don't think this is exactly what they had in mind.. one hannah Kersey, age 23 from the UK have birth to triplets. Triplets carried to term in her two uterii. I'm not pulling your leg, folks, she really does have two wombs. The three girls (two identical twins, and an odd one out) were born by cesarian section seven weeks early.

Does anyone out there have a USB scanner that I can borrow? Mine just died in the middle of something important... The new threat to teenagers these days is now taking prescription drugs instead of street drugs to get high. John Walters, director of National Drug Policy at the White House says that this is because there is a misperception that prescription drugs are somehow safer than street drugs.

Walters, you're dead wrong. It's because prescription drugs are now more powerful than just about anything you can buy off the street. Oxycontin is more powerful than heroin, ex-junkies say (and labs confirm, incidentally).

It's been an interesting day, to say the least.. I got out of work early yesterday after a meeting offsite because the office was closed yesterday, and most everyone is taking the last week of the year off for holiday vacation. I got home in time to stretch out a little and get some long-overdue Work done, and then headed back to the Metro station to pick up Lyssa, who unfortunately didn't get off early. We wound up at Anita's for dinner, because Lyssa had somehow gone all day without eating, which isn't particularly good for anyone. We had a warming, tasty dinner of Tex-Mex food, and then headed home to wrap gifts for Yule. I'd gotten a jumpstart a few days ago, but more gifts had arrived in the mail and I didn't want to run out of time.

I got the last of Lyssa's gifts wrapped up while listening to the two H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society albums, A Shoggoth on the Roof and A Very Scary Solstice. They're rather obscure, so a brief description that won't bore you is this: They're parodies of musicals and holiday carols with a distinct weird horror feel, featuring such gems as I Saw Mommy Kissing Yog-Sothoth and Silent Night, Blasphemous Night.

Okay, so it's a little weird for most people. I'm rather fond of good parodies.

Good parodies.

Jump ahead to today. Lyssa and I were working from home so that we'd have everything buttoned up for our Yule vacation and trip back to Pennsylvania to see friends and family. I did some more reading for work, and during a break I tried to hook up the scanner that I'd brought with me from Pittsburgh when I moved (sorry, Mom) to scan a couple of things into image files so that I can stitch them into .pdf files later, and discovered much to my chagrin that the scanner bought the farm. The optical element doesn't slide anymore, it just sits about one quarter of the way up the scanning tray and vibrates as the gears try to rip themselves apart.

I'm really sorry, Mom.

Scratch the document archival project for today.

After we'd gotten our work done today, Lyssa and I opened a couple of gifts early. We're going to be in Pittsburgh for the Yule holiday, so we're only going to bring with us a couple of things for other folks, including our families. Lyssa had given me a David Tenant Doctor Who figure that will be going with me to work in 2007 and something that I've been meaning to get for a while now, an Instant Music by ADS Technologies, which is a USB sound digitiser. The idea is that you can plug a turntable or a cassette player into it, plug the other end into a USB port on your computer, and you can record the music into .mp3 files for storage. I've got quite a few favourite LPs from my days as a DJ, so I'll be recording everything I possibly can into .mp3 files to put onto my iPod. She also gave me a copy of the Forever Knight soundtrack on CD, which has always been one of my favourites.

I don't have the time to outline everything I got for Lyssa because I should get to bed for the trip back home tomorrow morning, but suffice it to say that think I did right by her.